Kaddish for My Father

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

This volume presents a selection of poems from Scheier’s three
previous books. The one new addition to the collection is “Kaddish for
My Father.” In this long poem Scheier writes about her Jewish
father’s childhood in pogrom-torn Europe, “the German rapists of
little boys’ / mothers,” and his rave against “capitalists, /
social democrats and ‘Trotskyites.’” Scheier’s years of conflict
with her father are agonizingly illustrated in poems and prose pieces
that sometimes consider tipping him from his wheelchair and watching him
“tumble down a steep ravine, never to hurt anyone again.”

Most of the poems were written following her father’s death, on June
26, 1997, from Parkinson’s disease and colonic cancer. They speak of
the poet’s attempt to reconcile with her parent during his confinement
to “a home,” and of her own bid for emotional and spiritual healing
through a ritual that she experiences among friends at the Elat Chayyim
Jewish Renewal Retreat in the Catskill Mountains. Scheier hopes to share
this healing with her family (mother, brother, sister-in-law) in an
endeavor to relinquish the past.

Sky imagery, a potent force in and the volume, is paralleled with her
father’s “blue eyes / [which] grow deep black centres” like a
constant storm on the horizon. Is the “sun shining at full blast
God?” To the poet, raised in the blinding light of a patriarchal
culture, “it is more beautiful when the light is partial” and
everything (or everyone) is allowed its own variation. This is the
“divine light” that arouses her to write. A year and three weeks
after the death, the poet finds peace “under the sky again” while
sitting “on the Arcadian roof” where her “heart explodes like baby
spiders from their egg-nest at winter’s end.”

Sadly, Libby Scheier succumbed to cancer herself in November 2000. She
worked as a freelance journalist for various Toronto newspapers and
taught creative writing at York from 1988 to 1995. Her outspoken voice
will be sorely missed.